


The Final Mission

by Northern_Lady



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Wolverine (Movies), Wolverine and the X-Men (Comics), Wolverine and the X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Espionage, Family Fluff, Father-Daughter Relationship, Hydra (Marvel), Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, No Battles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-12
Updated: 2017-10-14
Packaged: 2019-01-16 13:56:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12344040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Northern_Lady/pseuds/Northern_Lady
Summary: In this story, the comic book marriage of Viper and Wolverine resulted in a daughter, Fiona, who was raised by her mother, in Hydra. Fiona is sent by her mother on a special mission to Xavier's School.Title changed.





	1. Chapter 1

The mission was simple. I was perfectly capable of carrying out a mission like this. All I had to do was gain the trust of my target and get close enough to inject the poison. It wouldn’t even be the first time I’d done a mission like this. So why did I feel so conflicted? It had been a week and everyone at Xavier’s School had been really nice to me, the young orphan mutant who had shown up at their door. It wasn’t that they were nice to me that had me feeling guilty, it was the fact that they weren’t at all what my mother had said they would be. Even so, there had been no chance to carry out my directive yet. I hadn’t even seen him, my father. He was apparently away on some mission of his own but was due to return any day now. 

It was during lunch at the cafeteria that I learned he had returned and my mission could finally begin in earnest. When he walked into the cafeteria, I was in for another surprise. My father wasn’t at all what I was told he would be. A lot of the students were happy to see him. He didn’t exactly enjoy all of the attention but he accepted it nonetheless. He wasn’t arrogant though like my mother had said. Not that I could see. 

“Mr Logan look,” one of the younger students approached him. “I made this for you,” the kid passed him some artwork which I couldn’t really see from my seat. 

He looked it over, a serious expression on his face. “This is pretty good. Thanks.” 

The kid beamed in happiness and walked away. No, this wasn’t at all what I was told he would be like. Was it all a trick, a manipulation? Was he just pretending to be nice so that these people would like him? Why would he care if the kids in a school and the teachers here liked him? What was his endgame? None of it made any sense at all. 

I didn’t go over and introduce myself to him. I didn’t need to. I would let him come to me. I was in one of his classes anyway. He would see my name on the roster tomorrow and that would be enough. 

I didn’t have to wait until the next day. That evening at supper my father sat down at a seat across from me. 

“So you’re the new student, Fiona Sarkissian?” He said to me. 

“I am,” I waited for him to continue, pretty much able to guess what he would say. 

“How old are you?” He asked. 

“Fourteen.” 

“Any relation to Ophelia Sarkissian?” He went on. 

“Yes, she is my mother.” 

“Is? They said you were an orphan…” he continued. 

“They assumed and I let them assume. My parents are both living.” 

“Living where?” he asked warily. 

“My mother lives in europe. My father lives here at this school.” I told him. This was where it would all begin. 

“No...no I don’t think so,” he didn’t believe me. 

“It’s true. That’s why I came here even though she didn’t want me to.” A lie but I knew how to tell them. “She said I shouldn’t meet you. That I’d only get hurt…” 

He shook his head. “Sounds like something she’d say.” 

“So it was true? You want nothing to do with a daughter?” I said, doing my best to sound disappointed.”I came all this way…” 

“Look kid, there’s no sense in getting all sentimental. I’m gonna want some proof and once I have that we’ll figure it out.” 

We visited Hank McCoy for a blood test that evening. He invited us to his lab to give us results before breakfast the next morning. They were exactly as I expected them to be. They clearly were not what my father expected. He actually looked a little overwhelmed. Hank left us alone to talk and I found that instead of keeping with the mission, I was little bit emotionally compromised. I was upset that it seemed he didn’t want a daughter. I had been told to expect that. I had prepared for it and yet I was unprepared. 

“I’m sorry,” I said, not sorry but upset. “Sorry to ruin your life like this.” 

“It’s not like that,” he said. 

“Then what is it like?” I was more angry than I should be. I needed to clear my head. 

“I told you we’d figure it out, I’m just gonna need a little more time to do that, that’s all.” 

“Right…” I bit back the tears that were starting to fall, having no idea why I was crying or why I should care. I’d just have to embrace the anger. It would make everything easier if I hated him. 

He sighed next to me. “Fiona...don’t do that.” his tone was far kinder than mine had been, 

“Don’t do what? Don’t cry?” I was still angry. 

“I don’t want to ever give you reason to cry.” 

His words stunned me. I had been trained to recognize lies and everything about his statement rang true. It didn’t make any sense that he would say that. “Why?” I breathed the question, thoroughly confused. 

He shrugged, not really having an answer. “It wouldn’t be right,” he finally said. 

His words were so contrary to everything my mother ever did. She had made me cry so many times I had lost count. She told me it was for my own good. That my tears were a part of lessons I needed to learn, part of my training, I had never questioned any of that. 

“Maybe your mother told you I wouldn’t be nice to you,” he said, on seeing my confusion. “We didn’t exactly get along.” 

“I don’t always get along with her either,” I said, throwing some truth into the mix because it worked to my advantage to have something in common with him. I had the syringe in my pocket. I needed only to find an excuse to hug him. If he saw it coming, he’d be able to stop me and then I’d fail my directive. However, if I could get him emotionally compromised and then get close, I could do this. My mom had this poison specially made. It would destroy his healing factor first and then kill him.

“You probably won’t always get along with me either but I’m willing to give it a try if you are,” he said and honestly sounded sincere. 

This was my cue, this was when I was supposed to tell him that getting along with him was exactly what I wanted. This was when I was supposed to tell him how hopeful I was at finally having a father and throw in all kinds of sentimental bullshit so I could dissolve into tears and get him to hug me. Some part of me hesitated. I don’t know why. I had been raised to kill him. That was all my mother wanted of me. It was all I needed to do for her to accept me. Yet, there was this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and I found myself settling on a reply that was far less sentimental. 

“That might be nice,” I said, not knowing why. 

He nodded, accepting my answer. “I don’t know about you but I’m hungry.” He got up to head to the cafeteria. “You coming?” 

I followed him out, conflicted with guilt. I hadn’t failed my mother yet. There was still plenty of time to get close to him and carry out my mission. It might even be easier if I gave us a little more time and then revealed some of the horrible details from my past so he’d feel sorry for me. This could still work. I just had to be strong enough to see it through.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter just so I can update before I head to work this morning,

I was invited to dinner, just me and my new Dad. I didn’t really want to go. He hadn’t said whether we were going someplace formal or casual. Either way, it was a public place and it would be difficult to carry out my mission there. It would at least be a good chance to give him some information and gain sympathy. We hadn’t had a chance to talk all day with classes and school stuff going on. I really hoped it wouldn’t take too many of these dinner meetings to get this over with. I just wanted to finish my objective and go home. 

He didn’t talk much as we rode in his truck into the city. Mom had told me he wasn’t much for talking. That much had been true. Sometimes it was hard to distinguish the truths from the lies with her. Like I had told my father, Mom and I didn’t always get along. She had plans for me, big plans, and she never seemed to care if I wanted anything different out of life. I knew she probably meant well in her own way. Or at least I hoped she did, but her ambitions weren’t always my own. Coming here to kill my father had been something she talked about having me do for years. No one else could kill him, she had said. No one else could get that close and survive if it goes wrong. The fact was, I had my father’s healing mutation. Mom had made the poison using my blood as a test of its strength. She had sent me on multiple assignments for Hydra so I could learn how to manipulate and get close to people. I wasn’t very good at it. She didn’t have to tell me that I sucked at being a spy. I already knew but she told me anyway. Then three weeks after being informed that my last mission was a failure she told me that I was ready to go meet my father. I wasn’t ready. I was pretty sure I would never be ready but I knew I would do it anyway. In the end, I always did what she asked me to do. 

“You got something on your mind, kid?” He asked me as we rode. 

“Just thinking about my mom is all,” I said. 

“You miss her?” 

“No,” I could honestly say that I didn’t. I wanted her approval but I didn’t miss her company. 

“I think I should talk to her,” 

I hadn’t expected that. I supposed it made sense. He would want to know why he hadn’t been told I existed and all that. 

“You have some way to contact her?” He went on. 

I shook my head. “No, she always uses burn phones. She knows where I am. She’ll contact me if she thinks she needs to.” I said, giving him an honest answer. 

“I don’t see how she could just let you go like that without having a way you could contact her,” He said, not too happy about it. 

I wondered if his statement was meant to insult my mother as a parent or was meant to indicate that something wasn’t right about the arrangements for my visit. Did he suspect why I had really come? “Like I said, she didn’t want me to go. I kinda just ran off.” I told him. “It wouldn’t be the first time.” Not strictly true but a useful thing to say. 

“Why did you run off?” He asked, just as I had hoped he would. 

“Sometimes it’s just too much pressure, all the stuff my Mom wants from me…” I told him with sincerity. I had at times wanted to run away for this very reason despite never having done it. “If I don’t get everything right, she freaks out.” 

“What do you mean, freaks out?” Now he was asking the right questions. 

“She just does a lot of yelling. She says I’m a failure and I’m useless and will never live up to my potential.” I told him and that wasn’t even the worst of it. 

“I’m sure none of that is true,” my father said, angered to hear it. 

I shrugged. This would be a good opportunity to ask some questions of my own. “Why didn’t you two get along?” 

“I married her to keep a promise, not because I wanted to marry her. She must have told you something about me though to explain why I wasn’t there. Whatever she said, I imagine most of it wasn’t good.” 

“A lot of it wasn’t,” I admitted. She had told me the reasons for their marriage and she had also told me that at one time, she loved my father and had hoped he would love her too. It never happened though “She said you never loved her because you were an arrogant jerk.” 

“I never loved her because I couldn’t trust her and because you can’t force something that doesn’t exist,” he said, irritated. 

He was right, it was difficult to trust my mom. Even I knew that and I didn’t hate her. Not really. She had her good qualities too. As I rode in his truck, thinking about my messed up parents, it occurred to me, if he hadn’t wanted to marry her and he didn’t love her, had even wanted to be with her at all or did I only exist because she raped him? The thought made me feel sick, so much that I grabbed a paper bag on the floor of his truck and started to wretch.


	3. Chapter 3

We didn’t keep driving. He pulled over the truck right there and parked on the side of the road. 

“You sick?” he asked me, concerned. 

“I’ll be okay. I just need some air.” I said, getting a hold of myself as I climbed out of the the truck. 

This was stupid. There was no reason to be upset. I never expected he would want me and I had known that he and my mother didn’t get along. Maybe some part of me had imagined that they had briefly cared about each other, another fantasy on my part. I was here to kill him after all so I don’t know why this discovery of how I came to exist would be so disturbing, except that it was. 

He got out of the truck and came around to the passenger side with a bottle of water which he must have stored somewhere in his truck and passed it to me. 

“Thanks,” I said, irritated that he was being nice to me again. 

“If you’re too sick to go out then we can do it another time.” 

“I’m not sick,” I said. The sick feeling was gone and had been replaced by something more like sadness and disappointment and a feeling that I was useless. I took a drink of the water he had given me. 

“If you’re not sick then you’re just upset about something,” He figured it out pretty quickly. 

My eyes met his. I didn’t want to talk about it. This wasn’t the sort of thing I was prepared to ask about. Maybe if I was the product of rape, it would be better to not know. “It’s fine,” I said quietly. “I mean it’s not fine, but…” 

“Look Fiona, whatever it is, I can’t help you if you don’t tell me.” He put a hand on my shoulder. 

This would be one of those moments I could have used to get close to him but I was so angry that instead of using the opportunity like I should have, I pulled away. “Why do you have to be so damn nice all the time anyway?” I snapped. I didn’t wait for him to reply. I climbed back inside the truck and slammed the door shut with more force than necessary.

He sighed and came around to the driver’s seat. “No one ever calls me nice,” he sounded as irritated as I felt. He started the truck. “Makes me think your mother must have been pretty hard on you if you think that I’m nice.”

“She was hard on me. It was always for my own good.” I repeated what she had told me every time she punished me. 

“I hope you’re not just defending her because she’s your mom. The woman I knew was capable of a lot of stuff that wasn’t good.” 

“I won’t disagree with that,” I replied. “She does bad things to her enemies. I’m not her enemy.” At least I hoped I wasn’t. Sometimes I wasn’t entirely sure how mom felt about me. She hated my father and she never hesitated to remind me that I was too much like him. 

“Are you sure? Because you haven’t talked much since you’ve been here and Hank says you have my healing mutation. You’re enough like me that she wouldn’t like it.” 

“She didn’t,” I quietly agreed. “She was always trying to change me. Maybe change wouldn’t have been such a bad thing,” I said, both to defend my mother and convince myself of it. Then I decided it might be best to keep to that theme and tell him about some of the cruel things my mother had done to me. “I just never knew how to change in the ways she wanted me to and when I couldn’t do it…” 

“She did more than just freak out,” He guessed. 

I nodded. “She didn’t hit me if that’s what you’re thinking. I was just locked in my room to think about what I’d done wrong. I was locked in there for a long time and I was all alone with noone to talk to and only granola bars and water. Once when I was six, I was in there for nine days. I got so scared that I jumped out my window. My room was in the attic and I didn’t know that I had a healing mutation back then. I just knew I had to get out, even if it killed me. That’s how I found out I could heal. I guess mom already knew. She said it was an important lesson for me to learn. That I needed to be willing to die to get what I wanted.”

He looked somewhat disturbed by what I had told him. My words were having the right effect. 

“I got a new room after that,” I went on. “One that I couldn’t get out of. Before I came here I was in for three weeks. Most people think it isn’t so bad, being alone for so long. It’s not like she was hurting me or like I starved. But being alone like that without human contact does weird things to your mind, I hated it.” I said brushing away a few angry tears. It made me angry to have to be weak in front of him but there really was no better way to accomplish my mission. 

He pulled the truck into a parking spot outside of what looked to be an Italian restaurant. “No one is gonna lock you in any rooms here.” There was anger in his tone. 

Over dinner we talked about him. I asked lots of questions about his past, about the school, about how he got his adamantium skeleton. I didn’t have the bone claws myself. Just the healing mutation. Somehow he seemed thankful that I didn’t have the claws. When we got back to the school I wandered over to one of the benches in the garden instead of going inside. He followed me and took a seat next to me. This was my moment. All I had to do was find the right thing to say. My hand was in my jacket pocket with a grip on the syringe. 

“Maybe things will be better, staying here,” I said. 

He didn’t react the way I expected. He was silent a moment before speaking. “What are you really up to, Fiona?” He sounded a bit irked. “You know I can smell lies? Your emotions and your words have been a wreck since the moment I met you. Something doesn’t add up. Why are you really here?” 

Shit. I should have known he would figure it out. He was pretty smart after all. I couldn’t believe I was failing my directive already. Mom was gonna be furious. She was right though. I was terrible at this. She probably even knew that he could smell lies and had sent me anyway. I started to cry. I thought about telling him I was just here to get to know my father but he would know I was lying. 

“Why would you say that? You said you didn’t want to make me cry.” I reminded him, still crying. It worked. He moved a little and put an arm around me. This was it, the only chance I was gonna get because he was already starting to figure out the truth. I leaned closer to him to hug him. The syringe was mostly hidden in my hand as a moved to hug him. I was only inches from plunging it into his neck when he caught my wrist. 

“What the hell is this?” He was far stronger than I am. He pulled the syringe from my hand. 

I couldn’t answer him. I could only cry harder. 

“You were sent here to what? Capture me?” He asked, more angry than I had seen him since I met him. 

“To kill you,” I admitted. “My mother sent me here to kill you with that poison that she made.” 

He dropped the syringe on the ground and crushed it with his boot. “I think that’s the first honest thing you’ve said since I met you.” 

I sighed, looking at the crushed syringe on the ground. I’d have to contact Mom now and get her to send me another one. This was gonna be even harder now that he knew the truth.


	4. Chapter 4

I waited until the middle of the night to access one of the computers in the library. I had a secure email account I could use to contact my mom. I wrote and told her that the weapon was destroyed and I needed a backup. She replied just five minutes later. 

“What did you do? Lose it? Or have you been compromised?” 

“Compromised. I’m sorry. I can still do this.” I replied. 

“No, I’m pulling you out. I should have known you couldn’t handle such a simple objective. A taxi will arrive for you tomorrow to take you to the airport. Be ready.” She sent to me. 

She was upset. I could tell just by the fact that the tone of her email wasn’t overly furious like it should have been. I was in for a long lock up when I got home. I wasn’t ready for that. I wasn’t ready for that or for her anger. “I can still do this. Give me one more chance, please? I won’t fail you this time.” 

I waited almost fifteen minutes before she replied. “A replacement syringe is on the way. Do not let me down.” 

I didn’t talk to my father all the next day. He didn’t sit with me at any of the meals. He didn’t call on me to participate in his class. He barely looked at me and when he did I could see that he was hurt. He hid it well. Probably no-one else even noticed but I could see the hurt was there a few times when his eyes met mine across the room. 

I found a box under my pillow when I got back from class. It had two syringes inside. I don’t know how my mother had gotten the replacement to me so fast or so discreetly but it didn’t surprise me. Her people were well trained and this mission was top priority. I slipped both the syringes into my pocket, sighed and headed to my father’s office. I was going to have to try to apologize or get him to forgive me. Except that wouldn’t work because he would know I was lying. What truths could I tell him that would allow me to get close? 

I wandered the hallway of Xavier’s School and then walked in the garden for a while just trying to think of some way or other that I could get close to him without him suspecting my motives. Nothing useful came to mind. He found me an hour later sitting on the ground absent mindedly tearing the petals off of a flower. 

“We need to talk,” he said. “Should have done that last night but I wasn’t in any state of mind for talking.” He had simply sent me to bed. 

I nodded, not disagreeing with him but having no idea what I was going to say. 

“You coming?” He asked, moving away. I got up and followed him. Apparently he planned to keep us walking in the gardens. That made sense. He wanted to be on his feet and alert to what I might do. I was just as alert and tried to keep my hand from wandering to my pocket. “You wanna explain to me exactly why you came here to kill me?” He said evenly. 

“Mom told me to,” I said simply. It was the truth. 

“I don’t know what kind of morals you’ve been raised with but most people know that it isn’t right to kill their own father.” 

“I know,” I didn’t disagree with that either. “Sometimes we have to do things that aren’t right.” 

“Like murder your father?” He asked. 

I didn’t reply. 

“I had Hank test the poison or what was left it from off the ground last night. It wouldn’t have killed me.” He told me. 

“Yes it would have,” I argued. “My mom had it made from my blood just to be sure it would work.” 

He sighed as if he had something important to say, something he didn’t want to tell me. “It would have killed you but not me.”

I was stunned. My mom was too much of an expert on poison to miss a detail like that. “Then why…?” 

“She probably expected I would defend myself by turning the poison on you. Your mother have any reason she wants you dead?” 

“No…” I shook my head. “No, you’re lying. My mom has issues but she wouldn’t kill me.” 

“I’m not lying,” he said gently. “And it kind of looks like she would kill you except that she could have done it anytime while you lived with her. Any idea why she’d use me to do it?” 

“Because she hates you,” I said truthfully. “She just wants to make you suffer...maybe she hates me too.” I started to cry just a little. 

“Maybe not. It could just be that her hatred for me outweighs everything else” 

His words made perfect sense. It explained everything I had experienced my entire life. I was never meant to kill the Wolverine. I was meant to be killed by him so that he could suffer the remorse of having killed his own daughter. My mother had used me and had never cared about me. I was crying a lot at this point and starting to have a meltdown. It occurred to me that if he was lying, I could use this moment to do what I came here for. Hand in my pocket, I leaned a little closer to him. He reached over and gripped my arm before I could even remove it from my pocket. 

“I know you got another set of poison there,” he said sadly. “Don’t bother. It isn’t gonna kill me.” 

“You care to prove that?” I asked through my tears. 

He let go of my arm. “Go ahead,” he said, sadness in his eyes. 

I didn’t hesitate for long. I took the syringe, flicked off the cap, and plunged it into his bicep. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t seem to be hurt, at least not by the poison. We stood there for a couple of minutes in silence, me anxious and relieved and guilty all at once while he merely looked sad. 

“It doesn’t look like this thing is gonna kill me,” he said. 

“I guess not,” I agreed, my voice shaken. He had been right all along. “I’m sorry…” I whispered. 

He only nodded. “You gonna stay here at the school after all this?” He asked me. 

The question threw me off guard. “You’d let me stay? After everything…?” 

“Fiona, your mother was willing to kill you just to get to me. Where else are you gonna go that’s safe?” 

“Why would you want me safe after I just tried to kill you?” I was thoroughly confused. 

“I don’t know. I’m just saying that if you want to stay and you’re willing to stop trying to kill me, you can stay. Just think about it.” He told me and then he held out his hand. 

“What?” I asked, unsure what he wanted. 

“Give me the other one,” he said. 

I huffed a sigh and gave him my last syringe, slapping it into his hand. 

“I’m going to supper. You just think about what I said, okay?” he said and he walked away, leaving me to my own confused thoughts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just one chapter left to wrap up this story and that chapter is already in the works.


	5. Chapter 5

I didn’t go to supper. I couldn’t face him just yet. I went to the computers and emailed my mom. I wasn’t sure she would even tell me the truth but I had to try. So I told her that my mission had failed. The poison hadn’t worked and I asked for instructions on what to do next. 

“I may have sent you an expired version. Spend the next week getting to know your father. Get close to him. I will update the poison and send a new vial by Morrison at the end of the week,” was her reply. 

Everything about her email terrified me. She would have never sent an expired poison. She didn’t make mistakes like that. And Morrison didn’t run errands. He was an assassin who was often given the job of killing Hydra agents who were compromised. She was sending someone to kill me. If she couldn’t give my father a lifetime of guilt for killing me, she would make sure he failed to save me. Morrison was a mutant with cybernetic implants. No one had ever beaten him yet. 

I couldn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t focus in class the next day. My father sat down across from me at lunch. “Something’s worrying you,” He said. It wasn’t a question. 

“I think...I think my Mom is sending someone to kill me.” I didn’t want to tell him but I did it anyway. 

“When?” 

“Probably the end of the week,” I said, worried. 

“She wants me to see you die. It isn’t gonna happen. Just stick close the rest of the week and I’ll make sure it doesn’t.” 

I did stick close to him the rest of the week. When I wasn’t in class, I was with my father. We even had my room moved next to his so that he could hear and be nearby in case of a threat. In that time, I learned that I sort of liked him. He never yelled at me. He never called me a failure. He never asked anything of me except that I do my homework or maybe eat healthier when he saw me binge on junk food during one kinda bad day. From what I could see, his nature was consistently honest. It was so nice after years of lies and manipulation to spend time with someone who just let me be. The end of the week came and Morrison didn’t. We both knew that my mom was probably trying to give the two of us more time to get close before she sent her man. 

It was late one evening on a Saturday night, two weeks after the last email from my mom. Half the school was out at a basketball game, many of the staff had dates or gone shopping in the city, as had the older students. My dad and I were in one of the living rooms with a movie on the TV. He sat at one end of the couch drinking a beer and I sat at the other, a notebook and pencil in my hand. I liked to draw to relax myself. 

“What you drawing?” He asked me after a while. 

I was drawing him. I didn’t didn’t really feel comfortable with showing him or telling him what I was drawing. “Just stuff,” I said. “It’s really not very good.” 

“Can I see?” 

I hesitantly let him look at my drawing. His expression changed as he looked it over. I wasn’t sure if he was sad or disappointed or what it meant. “I told you it wasn’t very good,” I said, snatching the notebook back from him. 

“No, it is good,” he said. 

“Just like Colin’s drawing was good?” I said, remembering the day I had met him and watched the little kid give him a drawing. 

“Colin’s drawing was good because it came from someone I care about. Yours is good because you actually have talent.” He said. 

For some reason that I could not explain, his words hurt and angered me all at once. “I’m tired,” I said, barely able to disguise my emotions. “I think I’ll go to bed now.” 

“Fiona wait…?” He called after me. I didn’t wait. I fled the room. 

He came after me and caught me in the hall. “What’s the matter with you?” He said, moving in front of me to block my path. 

“Nothing, I just realized that I don’t really care all that much about having talent.” I said, with a bit of sarcasm. 

His eyes widened as he understood my meaning. “I wasn’t trying to say that I don’t care about you.” 

“Well, that’s what it sounded like,” I wasn’t fully convinced. Now he was gonna tell me this was all for my own good. That talent is more useful than sentiment. At least that was what my mother would have said. I braced myself waiting for the inevitable words. 

“All I meant to say was that it was a good drawing all on its own. It was a compliment. Doesn’t mean I don’t care.” 

“Fine. I don’t need you to care,” I said, pulling away from him. 

He caught my arm. “That’s not true. I can smell lies, remember? I don’t know when it happened but you do need me to care. You’ve got nothing to worry about. I do care.” 

“But I didn’t do anything to make you care,” I protested. My mother’s approval always had conditions. It didn’t fully make sense that he would claim any such thing about caring for me. 

“You didn’t have to,” he said gently, his hand on my shoulder. “It’s not supposed to work like that. We love people for who they are, not what they do.” 

“Love?” I whispered. 

He nodded. He didn’t say the words but he did hug me and he did hold on to me until I was able to stop crying. “You gonna be okay?” he asked as he let me go. 

“I think I will be,” I said, starting to believe it for the first time in my life. 

“Good. Maybe you should get to bed anyhow. You look tired.” 

We had almost reached my room when we met Scott Summers and Hank McCoy headed down the hall towards us. 

“I’m glad we found you, Logan,” Hank said. “We found someone on school grounds. Someone we believe is from Hydra. It was quite a fight to capture him but he’s locked up in one of the basement rooms now.” 

“Morrison?” I asked, relieved. 

“Probably,” Scott said. 

“I want to see him,” I said. 

My Dad shook his head. “You’re not going anywhere near him. More importantly, he’s not going anywhere near you. I’ll take care of this. You get some sleep.” 

I never did see Morrison. I went to bed that night in my room alone and at peace with being there because I knew that here, I wasn’t ever really alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end. Maybe it isn't one of my best tales but I really enjoyed writing it. I hope someone out there enjoys reading it.


End file.
